


To Shanshu in LA

by igrockspock



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Apocalypse, Family, Gen, Mission Fic, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27081388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: When the apocalypse begins, Connor is offered a choice between leaving his father behind or giving up his normal life forever.
Relationships: Angel (BtVS) & Connor (AtS)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21
Collections: Fic In A Box





	To Shanshu in LA

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ancslove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancslove/gifts).



Connor skipped his macroeconomics final to save the world -- or at least Los Angeles -- from the apocalypse, and he succeeded, even though the thought of the F on his report card makes him want to throw up in his mouth a little. That’s going to be an awkward conversation with his dad. Well, one of his dads. Presumably the other one -- the one who’s making faint moaning sounds from the passenger seat of the convertible -- is happy about his choice.

Why does a vampire drive a convertible? He needs to discuss this with Angel, urgently, seeing as there are only four hours until sunrise and he’s not sure he can put enough distance between them and the last of Wolfram & Hart’s minions before then. _Are you_ trying _to kill yourself, young man? Are you under the impression that your life has no value? Did you even think at all?_ The exact same questions his father (his real father? His adoptive father?) had asked after the night with the cheap tequila and the alcohol poisoning and the stomach pumping. Except he’ll have to change the “young man” to “old man” if he wants to try out that particular monologue on Angel.

“You’re gonna be…” Angel’s voice is faint, and his skin is pale. Like a corpse, which Connor supposes he technically is.

The talking is promising though. Connor wants to make sure he does more of it. “I’m gonna be what?” he asks, keeping his eyes glued to the highway ahead, and the sky above, just in case there are more dragons.

“When I get better…” Angel coughs. “You’re gonna be in so much trouble.”

“ _I’m_ going to be in trouble?” Connor keeps his voice light. “ _You’re_ the one in trouble. You went to the apocalypse without telling me, and now you’re all dead-looking and covered with carbuncles.”

“Carbuncles?” Angel’s voice is slurred, but Connor thinks -- hopes -- he can hear a smile in it.

“There’s these weird purple bumps. Pretty gross, honestly.” Light flashes ahead, and Connor’s hands tense on the steering wheel, then slowly unclench when he realizes it’s just a flickering street light. 

He waits for a response, but there isn’t one. He glances away from the road again, and Angel’s eyes are closed. Connor pokes him, hard.

“ _Hey_ ,” he says. “You can’t fall asleep in the middle of threatening me. Why am I in so much trouble?”

“You were supposed to stay away. Be normal. Happy.” They’re on the edge of LA now, and Angel gestures weakly toward the rows of suburban houses around them. Connor figures it’s a reference to whatever kind of perfect life Angel imagines exists inside them.

“I _am_ happy,” he says, clamping a hand over Angel’s cold one. “But I’m not normal. It’s okay.”

Angel’s eyes are flickering again, and Connor keeps talking, frantically this time. “Stop that, okay? Please. For me. I need you to stay awake. There’s things I want to say.”

Honestly, Connor’s not sure vampires can die of anything besides stakes and fires and beheading, but the shaman on the battlefield had put the whammy on Angel hard. He _looks_ like he’s dying, and that’s enough to make waves of fear twist Connor’s stomach.

Angel doesn’t say anything, and Connor yanks on the hand he’s holding. “ _Angel._ Promise me. You’re going to stay awake.”

Angel squeezes back, more faintly than Connor would like, but his eyes are open again. “I’m trying,” he says. He clenches his jaw and squeezes back harder this time. “I’m awake. For you.”

“Okay.” Connor takes a shaky breath. Telling this story is why he’d driven to LA in the middle of an apocalypse. No backing down now. “Remember after the demon soldiers and Sahjhan, I told you I’d never been in a fight before? That was sort of a lie.” He glances at Angel again. “I’m not going on without an answer.”

Angel manages a faint nod, and Connor decides to accept it. “The end of my senior year, like a month before graduation, these football players were picking on this kid Josh in the cafeteria. He was skinny, and I think he was gay, but that’s not important. Nobody was doing anything about it, and it pissed me off.”

“And you did something about it?” Angel’s voice sounds a little stronger now, and his eyes are locked on Connor’s face.

“I did.” Connor can’t keep the pride out of his voice, even though he knows it was a small thing, one he should have done long before the last month of senior year. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just tried to get in between Josh and the football players. They hit me, and I went down, but it didn’t really hurt the way I expected it to.” He remembers laying on the linoleum floor, staring up at the ceiling tiles, thinking his lip ought to be split open, that he was supposed to feel humiliated by the sound of everyone laughing. Instead, he’d shrugged it off and stood up like nothing had happened. “I don’t know if it was the fourth or fifth time I got back up, but it was like my body remembered how to fight. I dropped back in this crouch, and I was sure that I was going to fight them and win, but they must have seen something on my face, because all three of them ran away.”

“Smart of them,” Angel mutters.

“Yeah, I guess,” Connor says, although it’s still strange to think he has superpowers. “The thing is, the principal couldn’t believe I beat those three guys without throwing a punch, so we all got in trouble for fighting. My dad was so mad at me.”

“He got you in trouble?” Angel looks indignant. “For helping someone?”

“He said I should’ve gotten a teacher. That we don’t solve problems with fisticuffs. He might’ve had a point.” Connor stops, breathes in deep. This is the thing he’d wanted to tell Angel, the reason he’d been determined to drive into an apocalypse, because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t say the words. “So I told my dad, ‘I was helping the helpless, just like you always said.’ And he looked down at the floor, and he said, ‘Son, I never said that, but I probably should’ve.’ And it was so weird, because I was so sure he’d said it. It was like those words had been with me my whole life.”

He’s been blazing through red lights, hightailing it out of LA, but he risks stopping at this one, just so he can look Angel in the face. “I just wanted you to know, I remembered you somehow. Even when I couldn’t explain it. And I did something good because of it.”

***

The car arrives at the edge of the desert before Connor realizes this is a terrible idea. He’d set out for it unconsciously, because he’s always loved it, and now he wonders if that’s because it reminds him of Quor’toth. Fighting on home territory -- or something like it -- probably isn’t a terrible idea, except that he’s driving an injured vampire into the most sunlit place in all of California.

He looks at his watch. An hour till sunrise, if he’s lucky. They need to find shelter fast. When a crumbling shack appears on the edge of the highway, he jerks the car over fast. 

“Too open,” Angel wheezes from the passenger seat. He’d rallied for a few hours, but his voice is doing that thready thing again, and Connor swallows back his fear.

“Yeah, well, somebody taught me you have to deal with the most immediate threat first,” he says, keeping his voice bright. “In other words, we have to get out of the sun.”

Frankly, Connor has no idea who taught him that. Angel, his father, Holtz, or some stray Scout master whipped up by the demon sorcerer who’d forged his memories. He brushes away his irritation at not being able to remember; all that matters is that it’s good advice, and honestly, he’s probably lucky to have so many different sources to choose from.

“Can you walk?” Connor asks, twisting around to grab the axe and the broadsword from the backseat.

“Sure I can,” Angel slurs. He opens the car door and promptly falls on the ground.  
“Great. I thought you were a badass creature of the night, but actually you’re like my drunk roommate,” Connor mutters. Somehow he manages to pull Angel off the ground without dropping the weapons, which he thinks counts as an advanced fighting skill.

“I’m glad you have a drunk roommate,” Angel mutters. “So normal.”

“All-American teenage boy,” Connor agrees, tugging Angel toward the shack’s door. His body feels hot, feverish even. Shouldn’t a vampire be cold? This is bad, he thinks, very, very bad.

The inside of the shack is a cramped room with a scorched-looking kitchenette on one side and a pile of blankets that might qualify for a bed on the other. He lays Angel on it, trying to be gentle, but Angel groans anyway. It’s a terrible sound, like he’s trying to be quiet about it and can’t manage, and it comes out as the high-pitched whine of an injured animal.

Okay, _think_. Connor sits down on a spindly chair next to the rickety kitchen table, and luckily, it doesn’t give under his weight. He knows a thousand and one ways to kill a vampire, and zero ways to keep one alive (properly undead?). Well, that’s not true. He knows one: blood. And if that’s what Angel needs, that’s what he’s going to get.

All he needs is something sharp enough to cut himself.

He hefts the broadsword, but something stops him. It doesn’t feel like a normal sword. Does he know what a normal sword feels like? Connor thinks on it for a moment, and decides that he does. Normal swords do not slice through dragon skin, or cut demon shamans in two. If he cuts himself with this, he’s not sure that he’ll heal.

“Nice sword,” Angel mutters from the bed. Connor can see how hard he’s trying to keep his eyes open. He keeps his promises.

“You gave it to me. Remember?” Connor asks, kneeling by the side of the bed.

“After Shajhan. You came back.”

Angel coughs, and Connor launches himself toward the narrow, grimy kitchen, looking for something to cut with. 

“What I said to you, after the fight, it didn’t feel like enough,” he says, hoping the sound of his voice is enough to keep Angel fighting. He remembers standing in Angel’s office, not knowing what to say. _You have to protect your family. I learned that from my father._

“So you came back upstairs.” Angel’s voice is getting fainter.

Connor rifles through the one slender drawer. The knife he finds is rusty, and he debates for a minute. Is Connor the Destroyer immune to tetanus? Is Connor the Normal Kid actually up to date on his shots, or are those records forged along with everything else? Maybe better not to tempt fate on that one.

“I felt like an ass, you know,” he says. “Coming back up the elevator right after I went down. And I realized I still had no idea what to say.”

“You hid it well.” The pride in Angel’s voice is unmistakable. “You said, _speaking of protecting the family, can we talk about some weapons now?_ It was a good line.”

“Yeah.” Connor smiles. “And you gave me the broadsword and the battle axe, out of the safe in your office.”

Even then, he’d known that Angel had given him something special. His best and his favorite, even though Connor had been sure he didn’t want to be a fighter. He’d only wanted a little piece of his birth father to take away, in case their paths never crossed again. 

“You know, those things got me in a lot of trouble in my dorm,” he says when he realizes it’s been too long since he heard Angel’s voice.

“They did?” Angel asks, or at least, that’s what it sounds like. It’s hard to hear around the coughing.

“Yeah, this girl I brought home… The next morning, she was looking for her, uh…” Connor’s voice trails off and heat rises to his face. Is this a thing he can tell Angel about? “Anyway, she was looking under the bed, and she cut herself. When she saw the battle axe, she screamed so loud the RA came to investigate. Turns out, you are not supposed to keep a battle axe _or_ a broadsword in your dorm, and if you do, you get to go to mandatory counseling and go on probation.”

Honestly, Connor thinks the story’s pretty funny, although his parents hadn’t felt that way. Since he hadn’t told them that his birth father was a vampire, or that he’d killed a demon sorcerer to protect them, he couldn’t really explain why -- other than being a budding axe murderer -- he might keep an extremely sharp axe under his bed.

Angel’s only answer is a rasping wheeze, and Connor contemplates punching his way through the dusty windowpane. It isn’t much protection against whatever might come for them, but he still hates to get rid of it. At a minimum, the sound of shattering glass would warn them of an intruder.

He pushes back a ragged curtain and finds a bathroom that’s not much more than a glorified alcove. The mirror above the sink is dirty but not rusted, and he slams his fist into it as hard as he can. Blood runs down his hand. Problem solved.

***

Connor wakes up to the sound of shattering glass. His memories are jumbled. Angel refusing to drink. Connor shoving his bleeding wrist against his fangs. Hindsight being 20/20, he should not have offered a major artery to a possibly-dying-definitely-very-injured vampire. He should’ve just bled into a cup or something, but he’s got bigger problems now. Namely, whoever or whatever just crashed through the window.

Sword in hand, he climbs to his feet. Well, climb is a generous word. It’s more like a stumble. A very menacing stumble. The room is spinning, and okay, he had clearly made some tactical mistakes last night in his desperate effort to nurse Angel back to health. To be fair, Holtz had never taught him what to do if you actually wanted the vampire _alive._

 _Shit._ He’s surrounded. He hasn’t actually looked behind him, but the hairs on the back of his neck are prickling in a way that warns him someone is watching him. In front of him are three demons clad in black. Their orange eyes gleam against dark blue skin. If not for that, they’d look human. Well, except for the curving, scorpion-like tails.

He pushes down a wave of fear. He’s been in worse situations, like that time Holtz left him tied bleeding to a tree. Okay, he was a little bit less dizzy then, but --

He doesn’t get to finish the thought before he’s on his knees with a stinger pressed against his throat.

The sword’s not in his hand anymore, but he still has a fist, and anything this human looking has to have balls, right? It’s a good thought, not really enough to be called a plan, but it works, and he’s up on his feet fighting again.

If he just weren’t so dizzy.

If there weren’t so many of them.

Did he really come all this way just to die?

The world stops.

Connor blinks. The demons are frozen, their tails arcing overhead, their long legs paused mid-kick. He approaches one cautiously and snaps his fingers in its face. No reaction. Maybe Angel knew some kind of magic, some vampire mojo that even Connor the Destroyer had never heard of. Not one to question good fortune, he bends to retrieve the sword from the floor. This is going to make the fight a whole lot easier.

And then the house starts to shake.

Connor snaps up from the floor, sword in hand, willing down a fresh wave of dizziness.  
The footsteps grow closer, the tiny cabin reverberating with every tread.

The door swings open.

Connor glimpses dark black skin covered with jagged armor, or maybe it’s a carapace. A long, curved spine protrudes from the demon’s shoulder. Two more frame a surprisingly human-looking head. Its red eyes latch onto Connor’s.

The demon smiles. “Hi,” it says in an unmistakably masculine voice. “I’m Skip.”

Connor’s sword doesn’t waver. “Wes killed you. They dismembered you in the basement.”

Skip sighs theatrically. “Yeah, well, the afterlife’s a bunch.” For the first time, Connor notices a piece of parchment dangling from one of the spines on Skip’s legs. The demon bends to retrieve it and reads, “Connor Riley, as the duly appointment servant -- that should read _slave_ \-- of the Powers That Be, I’m here to offer you a choice.”

“I don’t want it,” Connor says flatly. If a supernatural being offers you a choice, well, that’s some genie shit. Back on Quor’Toth, he’d learned the hard way that when it comes to genies, you just say no.

“That’s not how this works,” Skip says impatiently. “You have to pick one or the other. You can’t choose neither. Now, according to the Powers, I have to show you scenarios A, B, and C, and then you get to make your decision.” He sighs again. “I’ve got, like, seven more appointments today, so let’s make it snappy. Here, take this.”

He holds out a sheet of parchment toward Connor, who manages to take it without lowering his sword. Keeping one eye on the demon, he reads -- or tries to. The legalese makes his brain glaze over fast. All he really understands is that Angel’s signature is at the bottom, and it looks like it was written with blood.

“ _You_ are the shanshu,” Skip says, pointing one clawed finger at Connor’s chest.

Connor narrows his eyes. “The promise that Angel would become fully human, if he was good enough?”

“And here you are, superpowered human boy, born to two vampires. The shanshu come to life.” Skip nods.

“You said I have a choice?” In spite of Connor’s best intentions, the point of the sword is wavering.

“Here’s the thing, Angel signed away the prophecy.” Skip waves a hand as airily as a demon covered with a preternaturally hard exoskeleton can. “Something about duty, whatever he had to do to bring about the apocalypse and destroy the powers. What matters is that since he signed away his chance to become human, you get a choice. You can walk away from here, forget everything that’s happened in the last year. Your adoptive family will become your birth family, and your normal life will be your _real_ life. From Angel’s perspective, it will be like you were never born.”

“Or?” Connor asks, trying to sound like a shrewd businessman who could also cut a demon in half. It’s a tough combo to pull off.

Skip shrugs. “I walk out of here, and you go back to the exact moment before I walked in. Whatever happens, happens. But I warn you, it’s not likely to be a happy life.”

***

The shack fades into mist, and a new scene assembles around them: the lobby of the Hyperion.

He’s sitting on one of the big, round chairs in the lobby, about seven years old, dressed like a walking ad for the Gap -- which makes sense, because Cordy’s there in the background. _Of course_ she would pick out all of his clothes.

At the sight of her, shame washes over him, and he grits his teeth. Connor the Destroyer was pretty fucked up, for a lot of reasons, and Cordy was… a recently displaced higher being who might or might not have been possessed by the Devil. Shit got weird, and he’s not going to think about it anymore.

In fact, he’s just going to walk up to her -- or whatever version of her this might be -- and clear the air.

He takes two steps forward and bounces off an invisible barrier.

“What is this?” he asks, turning toward Skip.

The demon shrugs. “One of the lives you might’ve had, if you’d stayed with Angel. The Powers want you to see.”

“Because?” Connor prompts.

“Look, the future’s in flux now, kid. And anyway, the Powers can’t show you the future. That would be cheating. All they can do is show you how your life with Angel _would_ have turned out, so you can decide if you really want to stay with him,” Skip says. “Spoiler alert, all the options are pretty horrifying.”

Connor turns back toward the vision. It doesn’t _look_ horrifying.

Angel’s standing in the office now, and Cordy’s showing him a piece of paper, smiling brightly.

“All glowing reports!” she says, glancing toward the younger version of Connor, who’s wrapped up in a book. “He got six happy faces, and one check plus.”

“Happy faces? That’s how they grade things now?” Angel looks incredulous. “Back in my day--”

“The nuns rapped you across the knuckles if your ink pot was… Actually, you’re so old I don’t even know how to finish that sentence.” Cordy rolls her eyes.

Angel’s face suddenly goes anxious. “And the paperwork?”

“Totally fine.” Cordy nudges him with her elbow. “What did I tell you?”

Angel’s voice drops, and he glances sidelong at the little version of Connor, like he’s worried that he’ll hear. “Well, after the thing at the last school…”

Cordy nods. “But we learned from our mistakes, right? If the baby daddy is some cradle robbing creature of the night, and mom’s a pile of dust, you’d better have a cover story. And some high quality forged documents to go with it. Now we do, and they totally believed that I’m his mom.”

“Because you _are_ his mom.” 

The air around Cordy and Angel thickens, and Connor finds himself rooting for Angel to kiss her. They _should_ have this chance he thinks, the way they were meant to, before… He closes the door on that set of memories, and the long, terrible chain of events that unfolded afterward.

Sure enough, they’re moving closer together. Cordy turns her face toward Angel --

And something skitters across the lobby floor.

Skitter is never a good word in Connor’s world.

Even Connor the Destroyer has never seen anything like the demon that enters the hotel. It’s like a shrimp, the way King Kong is like a gorilla. And it has claws. So, so many claws. And it’s going straight for Connor.

Angel throws himself in front of the creature unarmed, as if that’s going to do any good. _Sloppy,_ Connor thinks. _You can’t let sentiment get in the way of sound battle tactics._ The voice in his head sounds a lot like Holtz. 

Cordy, meanwhile, is flinging vials of holy water at it, but they smoke and dissipate without leaving a scratch. Gunn thunders down the stairs with a crossbow, Wesley close behind, but the creature is dangling little Connor over its gaping maw.

And, well, Skip _had_ said this didn’t end well, right? Connor was expecting something less random than being eaten by a giant shrimp, but it’s the kind of thing that could definitely happen to a child in Angel’s world.

Except, wait, little Connor’s got some serious moves. There’s something in his hand. A shiv, maybe? It’s made from something luminous and white, a piece of mystical bone maybe. He lunges toward the creature’s eye, and it drops him with a shriek as a puddle of black ichor oozes across the floor.

Angel snatches him out of harm’s way and tosses him to Cordy, like maybe this kind of thing has happened a time or three before. The gang converges around the writhing shrimp thing, and soon it’s dead. Little Connor pokes his head out from under Angel’s desk.

“Hey, can I keep this?” he asks. He’s got one of the demon’s bright blue claws in his hand. He must’ve snapped it off in the fight.

There’s a lot of shuffling and awkward silence while the gang looks around at each other. Clearly, this is the type of parenting dilemma that demon hunters experience frequently.

“Don’t look at me,” Cordy says. “I was raised by the nanny. It was a different kind of dysfunctional.”

Gunn shrugs. “I don’t see the problem.”

Fred’s face lights up. “We could do experiments on it together.”

Angel’s nodding, and Connor knows he’s about to say something like, _yeah, sure, pretty badass._

But then Wes swoops in and takes back the claw. “Sharp objects are not appropriate children’s toys.” He glares at each of the gang in turn. “We’ve been over this, remember?”

Angel drops a hand onto Connor’s shoulder. “Well, it’s a good thing he had the shiv.” Then he frowns. “Only one weapon on your person at a time, alright? So you want the claw or the shiv?”

“Shiv’s a better deal,” Gunn says. “Sanctified and all.”

Connor watches from a distance as the younger version of Connor nods and shakes his head, accepting defeat -- or pretending to, anyway. His eyes follow Wes as he tucks the claw into a drawer.

Cordy holds her hand out and sighs. “Come on, little man, we need to get you changed.” She looks back at Angel. “You’re gonna have to give us a bigger clothing budget.”

Connor can’t help but smile as he watches them climb the stairs together. Skip had exaggerated. This wasn’t a bad childhood -- it was weird, sure, but honestly, it looked pretty fun. And obviously, he’d been loved. What else was a kid supposed to wish for?

“Hang on, kid,” Skip says, and he sounds almost mournful. “Wait till you see the rest.”

The lobby of the Hyperion fades on the vision of Cordy leading Connor up the stairs. Soon it’s replaced by a first grade classroom with elegant paneled walls and old-fashioned wooden desks. Angel had sent him to private school, nice.

Little Connor is making his way to the front of the classroom, looking eager but trying to keep a discreet hand over a hole in his blazer -- the legacy of another demon fight, probably.

“How to defeat a Kwa-woth Demon,” he intones, his tongue tripping easily over the strange syllables. “This demon takes the form of a giant shrimp with seventy-two to ninety-four claws. The eye may be pierced with a dagger made from sanctified bone, releasing the ichor -- “

“Connor, that’s enough,” a stern voice erupts from the back of the classroom. The rest of the class erupts into giggles. “I appreciate your imagination, but I have told you, these graphic descriptions are not appropriate for school.”

The teacher comes forward, holding her hand out for the paper.

“It’s not my imagination,” Connor says through gritted teeth. He doesn’t let go of the paper, not even when the teacher tries to yank it from his hand. He raises his arm, trying to keep his grip, and the half-torn cuff of his shirt slides up, exposing a row of neat, regular claw marks.

 _Shit._ Connor doesn’t need to be enrolled at Stanford to know what happens next.

The teacher barely stifles her gasp. Her gaze going soft, she lays a careful hand on little Connor’s narrow shoulder. “Come on,” she says, “we’re going to take you to the nurse.”

The scene shifts again, this time revealing a wood-panelled principal’s office. The young Connor had looked defiant before. Now his voice is wavering, and his eyes are filled with tears.

“I’m telling you, it was a demon,” he says, a small hand locked around the principal’s sleeve. “My dad wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Abused children adopt fantasies sometimes. I’ve seen it before,” a woman says. She’s tall, blond, and -- Connor hates himself for noticing -- hot. “I’ve been trailing this Angel for _years._ He’s not getting away this time.”

“Thank you, Detective Lockley,” the principal says. “You said you wanted to see the enrollment paperwork?”

She barely glances at the contents of the folder before she pronounces, “This adoption certificate is forged. Cordelia Chase, huh? Known associate of Angel.”

She kneels on the floor in front of the young Connor. “You’re safe now, okay? We’re going to get you a good foster family, and we’ll find out where you belong. And I promise, Angel will _pay._ ”

“You’re going to hurt my dad?” he asks, small voice quivering. 

Detective Lockley’s mouth presses into a flat line. Watching from afar, Connor sees her start to say that Angel _isn’t_ his father, and punishing people isn’t the same thing as hurting them, but he loses the words in a buzz of static. The little version of him is backing up, his tearful eyes full of determination.

“Don’t be afraid,” Detective Lockley says.

But small as he is, Connor’s not afraid. He’s giving himself room to attack. 

Even through the veil of distance, Connor doesn’t want to know how this story ends -- whether that little version of him had the shiv, the claw, or both; whether he had maimed or killed; whether Cordy had gone to jail or the tragedy had brought forth a darker version of Angel. He turns away from the vision, fixing his eyes on the dingy pile of blankets that hide Angel -- _his_ Angel, the one in the here and now -- from the sun. From the corner of his eye, he sees a spray of blood hit the screen that separates him from the vision before it fades away, revealing the collapsing cabin filled with demon soldiers.

He turns toward Skip. “I want Gatorade.”

“What?” The demon’s craggy face isn’t very expressive, but Connor finds an odd sort of triumph in hearing the surprise in his voice. “You just watched your tiny cute self kill a detective, and now you’re handing out drink orders?”

“Some popcorn would be good too,” he says. “But if that’s too much trouble, I could go for a sandwich.”

“I’m the guide to the life that you could have lived, empowered to assist you in making a vital choice about your future,” Skip says, drawing himself up to his full and admittedly impressive height. “I’m not a _waiter._ ”

“Yeah, well, I figure anyone who comes with supernatural visions can get me a bottle of Gatorade.” Connor crosses his arms over his chest. “So if the Powers want me to watch, they need to get me a snack.”

“College kids,” Skip huffs, but he holds out his hand, and a thirty-two ounce bottle appears, followed by a large red-and-white container of popcorn.

Connor settles on the floor and pops the lid. Isotonic solution, or the closest he can come, anyway. His mom had gone back to nursing school when he was in sixth grade. They’d been study buddies, so he’d learned a lot of random shit about emergency medicine. Like that the best treatment for blood loss is an isotonic fluid administered intravenously -- which he can’t ask for without tipping off Skip that he plans to fight his way out of here. Gatorade is the best he can do.

“Alright,” he says, “Bring me your next horrifying vision.”

They’re in a principal’s office again, but a public school this time. Connor can tell from the cinderblock walls and the cluttered desk with the faux wood laminate top. He’s older now, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with a tragically wispy mustache and, oh god, is that a Nickelback shirt?

“Cheating is a very offense, young man,” the principal is saying. “Especially for a top-ranked student like yourself.”

Connor feels a small surge of satisfaction that he excelled academically in any universe, but it flickered away quickly. The grade-grubbing Stanford student is already starting to feel like an old skin he’d shed.

He hears a derisive snort from the back of the office. “Offense? I think you mean allegation. I sure haven’t seen any proof.”

Angel’s standing in the corner by the door, in the lone patch of shade, looking ready for a fight. He feels an immediate surge of love. Coming to a parent conference in the middle of the day couldn’t have been easy for Angel. He wonders if his hypothetical younger self understands or appreciates the sacrifice. 

The younger Connor looks back at Angel, rises from the chair, and closes the blinds, managing to clip the principal’s shoulder along the way. It’s a small office, but it still doesn’t look like an accident.

“My father has an eye injury. No direct sunlight. It says it in the file.” He sprawls in the office chair, looking surly.

“Look, Mr., ah…” The principal glances at the file and hesitates.

“Angel. Just Angel.” 

Interesting, Connor thinks. In this universe, they’re not pretending so much.

The principal licks his lips. Angel’s sitting in the desk chair next to Connor now, and he doesn’t look totally happy about the proximity.

“Well, Mr. Angel, this is Connor’s trigonometry final. As you can see, the work is identical to the answers in the teacher’s edition of the text.”

“And you didn’t consider that my kid is just, I dunno, _smart_?” Angel asks.

The younger Connor smirks. The older Connor, still settled on the floor on the edge of the vision, crunches his popcorn, interested in spite of himself. He notices that Angel’s leather jacket looks a little worse for wear, and the soles of his shoes look thin. This isn’t a private school kind of universe, then.

“They don’t think poor kids are smart here,” his younger self says. He sounds defiant, but from the way he’s toying with the fraying hem of his t-shirt, Connor thinks the constant underestimation needles him.

“Rich or poor has nothing to do with it. Having the exact solution from the teacher’s edition for every problem is one hell -- I mean, _heck_ \-- of a coincidence.”

The younger Connor gives a short, bitter laugh when the principal corrects the mild profanity. It’s obvious that this version of himself grew up around a lot worse than four-letter words.

“Look, I have a photographic memory,” he says. “If the teacher leaves the book out, what do you want me to do? Just try to unsee it? It was right in front of me!”

Angel leans over the principal’s desk like he’s trying to intimidate the overlord of some demon realm -- which, technically, a high school might be. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re gonna give my kid another test, and when he passes it, you’ll apologize.”

The vision dissolves then and reforms on Angel and Connor walking through a sewer.

“I’m sorry I failed the retest, Dad.” He scuffs the ground with his toe. “I just couldn’t focus on studying this week.”

They’re walking close enough that their shoulders bump against each other, and Angel throws an arm around him. “It’s okay, son. A lot’s happened.”

From his vantage point at the edge of the vision, Connor tenses, waiting for this younger version of himself to flinch away from the contact and lash out. But instead he leans in. Whatever else had happened here, this Connor knows how to accept love.

“What happened to Stacy wasn’t your fault,” Angel says. “You know that, right?”

The younger Connor stops. “She should’ve listened to me about the fire demons. I mean, come on!”

“Exactly,” Angel says, pulling him along.

“But that’s my second girlfriend who’s gotten eaten.”

“Yeah, maybe lay off the normal girls for a while,”Angel says, making a face. “Give it a few years, and we can find you a nice werewolf, or half-demon from a more assimilationist species…” He stops. “This is about Cordy, isn’t it?”

Connor’s voice goes low. “She’s not getting better, is she?”

Angel swallows. He forces his lips up into something like a grin, like he’s about to say something reassuring, and then the fake happiness slides away. “No, she’s not. If she hasn’t woken up by now, we should talk about…”

“Taking her off life support,” Connor finishes hollowly. “She saved me.” His voice breaks. “It’s never going to stop, is it? Every evil thing in the world is going to come after me, because they think I have some kind of mystical power, or they want to, I dunno, grind up my bones and --”

Angel’s hand is back on his shoulder fast, with that special vampire speed that he barely ever uses, even in a fight. “We’re going to keep fighting. Even if it’s just the two of us now.”

“After what happened to Fred and Gunn and Wesley…” Connor shakes his head. “Now Cordy too. Sometimes I think the world would be better without me in it.”

Outside the vision, Connor shakes his head and forces himself to eat another mouthful of popcorn, like he’s just watching a movie back in his dorm room. 

“Does this thing have a fast forward button?” he asks Skip. “I get the point. Life with Angel ends badly. Do I have to actually watch myself kill myself?”

“Oh, that’s not how this one ends,” Skip says. He snaps his fingers and the vision starts moving faster. The sound turns into a high-pitched whine. “See, this is Angel cheering you up with _another_ inspirational speech. Even if I have to admit it, the guy has a gift. Of course, he can’t control what people decide to do with their inspiration.”

The Connor in the vision is still moving at three times the normal speed. He’s back at the Hyperion, alone now, pulling an ominous looking black tome out of a hiding place in his bedroom. There are some sacrifices -- possibly with blood -- in front of a picture of Wes and Cordy and Fred and Gunn, followed by a lot of chanting.

“Shit. Am I trying to raise my friends from the dead?” Connor asks, and Skip nods.

“Spoiler alert, they come back wrong.”

Connor had expected zombies, but that’s _way_ too ordinary. 

“Are they, um, joined into one body?” he asks, squinting at the multi-limbed, multi-headed creature on the screen.

“Ready to fight your enemies, and fight themselves,” Skip says.

“And this is really not a scenario where I end up killing myself?” he asks. In the vision, he’s watching wide-eyed as Gunn yanks a chunk of Wesley’s hair. There’s really a lot of shrieking.

“Not even close.” Skip presses some kind of cosmic remote control, and the vision lurches forward to a wild-looking version of Connor surrounded by stacks of spellbooks and strange ingredients. “This is the scenario where you do more magic to try and fix your last magic and you turn into the most terrifying warlock LA has ever seen. So then your dad has to decide whether to kill you and…”

“Total mess,” Connor agrees. The Gatorade, to his surprise, is actually making him feel better. More like he has a bad hangover, and less like he was almost exsanguinated last night. He makes a show of shaking his empty popcorn container, and Skip responds by offering him a roast beef sandwich. Maybe he has a shot of getting out of here alive after all. He nods to the dusty patch in the middle of the floor where the visions have been playing. “What else you got?”

The last vision -- scenario C, Skip calls it -- is the worst, not surprisingly. In this one, he makes it to his eighteenth birthday and goes after Wolfram & Hart on his own. He fails, everyone he’s ever loved dies in front of him, and he winds up a prisoner with some kind of locked-in syndrome that allows him to communicate only by blinking his left eyelid. 

For the first time, he longs for the home he left behind. Waking up to the smell of pancakes and the sound of his sister’s cartoons downstairs, wrapped in the certainty that everything in his world will be okay. Everything’s felt jangly and wrong since he learned his true past, like his family’s a sandcastle ready to crumble beneath the slightest wave. He misses being safe.

“It’s okay, kid,” Skip says soothingly, pushing a pen and paper across the dusty floor. He jerks his head toward Angel, still asleep beneath the pile of blankets. “Even _he_ wouldn’t blame you. It’s what he wanted.”

Connor picks up the pen. One stroke, and he goes back to the life he’s always known, except this time it will be real. 

But will it be _right_?

“Look at yourself,” Skip says. “Well, I guess you can’t. You know, since you had to break the only mirror in the house so you could feed your father your blood. Which is kind of my point. You’ve been with Angel for less than a day and you almost bled to death on the floor.”

“Are there more of them?” Connor asks.

“Yeah.” Skip unfurls his parchment. “Scenario D is the suicide scenario. E through J involved loved ones dying. In scenario K, Angelus makes an appearance. Want me to keep going?”

“I think what you’re telling me is that there were about a million ways my life could’ve gone wrong, and only one way for it to turn out right. And Angel found it.” Connor feels warm, which he doesn’t think is a symptom of blood loss. It’s more like an inner warmth, the kind you get when you know you’re really, really loved. 

Rationally speaking, he gets that he should sign the paper. In the best case scenario, with Angel, he’s facing some kind of Peter Parker dilemma, where keeping a foot in two different worlds tears him in half. And in the worst case scenario, death. Possibly his. Definitely people he loves. That’s no kind of choice. If Angel were awake now, if he could see him, he would say to sign the paper; it’s the exact ending he tried to sacrifice for, and now there’s just this one little piece to complete. 

His pen hovers over the paper. That’s when he hears his father’s voice in his head. Not Angel. The father who’d raised him. That voice says, “son, if I teach you nothing else in this life, never ever sign a paper you don’t understand.”

The best life advice an attorney could possibly pass on to his child. Connor has always taken it seriously. He narrows his eyes.

“What do you get out of this?”

“Me?” Skip asks, laying a hand on his chest. “Nothing, kid. I told you, I’m just the messenger. Enslaved to the powers as punishment for trying to fuck with them.”

“Yeah, but you really seem like you want me to sign this paper,” Connor says. “It’s not like you’re showing me both sides here. Who says you don’t work for someone who wants me out of the picture?”

“You sure that’s the kind of chance you wanna take?” Skip asks.

The room wavers again and vision after vision reappears: his body hanging from a noose, his body ripped apart by demons. Watching girlfriends get devoured. Seeing Wes die trying to protect him. Standing over Cordy’s hospital bed, watching her heartbeat flatline.

The image freezes, and Connor walks toward the bed. This time, the barrier lets him through so he’s standing by the alternate version of himself, looking down at Cordy’s pale face.

Cordelia had been offered the same choice. She’d told him about it, right after he’d come back from Quor-Toth, before everything had gone so wrong. Her life would’ve been easier if she’d never met Angel, but she still chose the fight.

Does Connor even _want_ that old life, the one that had never quite been real?

Angel had made a deal to get him far away from LA. Still, he found himself back in California. Even when he couldn’t explain how or why, Angel’s words had stuck with him, and he’d done a good thing because of them.

_Son, don’t ever sign a contract unless you’re sure the other party can uphold their end of the deal._

Lawyer dad advice. Who knew it would be so good for navigating the supernatural?

Because really, what does he even know about Skip? That he tried to betray the Powers once, whatever those were. He can make some cool vision things. But does that mean that he, or whoever he represents, can really change reality? Or will he just get pulled back into this world a month or a year later, this time without supernatural strength surging through his limbs and an extra set of memories to guide him?

There’s a Zippo lighter in his pocket. It was his grandfather’s, from World War II or something. He’s never actually smoked anything, or set anything on fire. He just carried it to feel like a badass. Now, for the first time, he’s actually going to do something badass with it.

He dangles the corner of the parchment over the lighter. It goes up in a whoosh of flame. The last vestiges of the vision ripple and fade. Demon soldiers reanimate around him, and Connor drops back into the fighting stance his body never forgot, sword held aloft.

“Bring it,” he says, putting himself between Angel and the demon horde.

His choice is made.

***

Connor knows he’s fought more demons than this at once. The memory is buried somewhere deep in the core of his brain, somewhere he doesn’t want to look, but the burning in his muscles and the constant swing of his sword _feels_ familiar. The soldiers fall, one by one.

The problem is, there’s always another one. And maybe he’s fought whole demon hoards before, but not while half-drained of blood, on a diet of Gatorade and popcorn, less than 24 hours after fighting the apocalypse.

From the corner of his eye, he notices that Skip is still standing next to the stove, with a bowl of popcorn now. There’s a woman beside him, tall and elegant, wearing heels and a printed scarf tied around her neck.

“Told you he wouldn’t take the deal,” she says, reaching for some of the popcorn. “Nice try, though. Saying you worked for the Powers was a nice touch. The Partners probably would’ve released you if you’d gotten him to sign.”

“Still might, if he goes down tonight,” Skip says. He grins -- as much as his rocky face allows -- and adds, “Don’t be jealous, Lilah.”

Lilah -- whoever she is -- snorts. “There’s only one soldier left.”

 _One left._ Connor repeats the words over and over as he tries to raise the sword, but his limbs feel like lead. There’s blood on the floor, and his foot shoots out from under him.

“What did you put in his snacks?” Lilah asks with a grin.

Connor doesn’t hear Skip’s answer, but he doesn’t need to. The world is blurring. His sword is gone. The demon’s scorpion-like tail is arcing over him, leaning down to strike --

\-- and a pale white hand reaches through the fading rays of sunshine to stop it.

Angel.

Still as white as a corpse, smoking slightly in the sun, but quite immovable.

“I think you’ll find that your mistake was laying your _hands_ on my _son_ ,” he says, his voice lisping a little around his fangs. 

The demon doesn’t last long.

Angel steps across the sunshine again, ignoring the smoke rising from his skin. Connor watches the woman -- Lilah -- flinch and position herself more directly in front of the narrow kitchen window, where the sunlight is rapidly fading behind her.

“Will I be killing you two?” Angel asks conversationally, fangs still at the ready.

Connor tries to get up from the floor but thinks better of it quickly. Killing seems like the kind of thing he should help with, but his legs are about as strong as noodles right now. _Don’t take popcorn from demons._ Probably a good rule for his new life, right up there with not taking candy from strangers.

Lilah’s backed away as far as she can in the narrow space, though she’s still trying to look nonchalant. “You know you can’t kill people who’re already dead,” she says. “At least not permanently. And anyway, there’s no need to try. Skip thought he might get out of hell if he got your son to sign away his role in the prophecy, but as he clearly failed, we’ll be leaving. And by _we_ , I mean all of Wolfram & Hart.” She glances at Connor, who’s managed to halfway sit up on the floor. “We don’t intend to fight against _two_ of you.” She shoots Angel a wolf-like grin. “At least, not for now.”

She and Skip vanish. Just _poof_ , gone, into thin air. To be fair, that’s not the weirdest thing Connor’s seen in the last twenty-four hours, and certainly not the weirdest thing buried in Connor the Destroyer’s memories. But this is all, in some kind of weird technical way, still new to him, and he’s still gaping at the empty spot in front of the window when Angel spins around to help him up.

They both kind of stumble and almost go down, but somehow Angel rights them both, and they wind up leaning against each other, watching the sunset over the desert.

“So,” Connor says finally, “Did we just win the apocalypse?”

“Yeah,” Angel says, sounding faintly surprised. “Well, this one anyway.”

“Are there going to be a lot more?” Connor asks.

Angel nods. “Probably.” He turns toward Connor with a rueful grin. “Usually in May. Kind of awkward with finals, I know.”

Connor feels his lips tug upward. The grin feels alien after the last twenty-four hours of fights and desperate flights, but he can’t help the frisson of excitement flooding through his body. Yeah, it’s going to be complicated -- like he’s some kind of Peter Parker now, living a normal life and fighting evil on the side -- but it’s good too, like coming back to a home he didn’t know he’d lost.

A wave of dizziness rushes over him and he stumbles again, but Angel catches him before he hits the floor.

There’s so much to say, but he decides to start simple.

“Thanks, Dad,” he says, and watches the smile spread across his father’s tired face.


End file.
